'Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force' The New York Times

'It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces'

Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara. As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here. Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grace. Then he sees a way out.

The fifth book in Bassani's Novel of Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with his life.

A new translation of Bassani's haunting last novel: a portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with life and loneliness.
In the fifth book of the Romanzo di Ferrara, Bassani follows a day in the slipping life of Edgardo Limentani, a man of forty-five who sets out with a shooting party into the watery countryside surrounding Ferrara. As the day wears on, his malaise grows, seeping from his thoughts and feelings into the natural world around him, until it reaches an intolerable pitch. This taut depiction of one man's reckoning with his unfulfilling life evokes in cinematic detail how inescapable loneliness turns to despair.